


Making a Plan

by vocal_bard (atrickstertype)



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:21:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrickstertype/pseuds/vocal_bard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a lot to change a god.  Throwing a one-man wake might just do it.  Warnings for mourning, foul language, and death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making a Plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/gifts).



> I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of way is that for a god to die? -Wednesday

The body is just lying there.

    He’s seen bodies before, of course.  When your daughter is the goddess of the inglorious dead and your brother‘s the Gallows God himself, it‘s pretty much unavoidable.  And when your best friend is…

    Well, he’s seen them.  

    But usually, they are doing something.  They’re decomposing, at the very least.  Sometimes, they’re burning.   Often, they’re being eaten.  There’s still movement.  There’s dynamism, chaos, progression. 

    This one is just lying there.

    He guesses it’s different with the corpses of gods.  

    The shotgun has done a damn fine job of spreading a thin layer of brain and bone across an entire wall of the little room while leaving the face mostly intact.  If it wasn’t for the gore, Thor (husband of Sif, son of Odin and the Earth, god of thunder, protector of Midgard, down and out bum and alcoholic) could almost be laying on the bed sideways, looking up at the ceiling.  If it wasn’t for the smell, this could all be a really fantastic joke.

    It isn’t.

    “You never could tell a good joke.”  He smiles, as best he can.  It doesn't seem to fit on his face.  “Do you remember when we went to see Thrym?  ‘I’ve got a good one’ you said.  And then you killed everybody.  Although, that was pretty funny at the time.”  He reaches out and touches the wall, and his hand comes back stained.  His smile fades.  “If that ever actually happened. “

    He looks around the room again.  The whole place smells like wet, rotting wood and iron.  Damn place doesn’t even have running water, for all that it’s on a pier.  Over on the side table, a basin has about half an inch of brackish liquid in it, despite the crack that runs along one side.  Its pitcher is empty.

    “You washed your face?”  He shakes his head.  “I still… I still don’t get you.”  The water smells like rust  and various minerals.  It’s dirty.  He picks up the basin and dumps it over his head.  So much for this suit.

    He sputters, wipes the water out of his eyes.  “Did you know I’d sit wake for you?  Wednesday only sits wake for himself.  And Sif… well, you know how she is.  Probably off in a speakeasy somewhere, having the time of her life.  We couldn’t find her.  Not that I tried very hard.”  The knife he pulls from his haversack is as sharp as it has ever been and very very old.  He tests it against his thumb and sucks up the blood  that it draws.  “The bitch would probably try to keep me out.  And that’s not going to happen.”

    There’s a note where the basin was sitting.  It reads very simply:.

    _There is nothing I can do to help them._

    He stares at it for a long moment, water dripping from his hair, and shakes his head.  "As if they'd let you..." he mutturs, then cuts himself off and turns away.  He sits in the room’s lone chair, a splintery thing on its last legs (all three of them) and begins to cut his hair, sawing away at handfuls at a time.  “Ah.  You know, this is a good knife.  I like this knife.  But….ngh.  This hurts.  I hope you appreciate it.  Not that it much matters.  All this,” he motions at the pattern of blood and brain, a grimace on his face, “is for nothing, you know.  Suicide doesn't count as death in battle, no matter how violent it is.  So there's no Valhalla for you.  It’s straight to my daughter.  If you’re lucky.  If I can pull enough strings.  If that damn Egyptian menagerie doesn’t get to you first.  Hope it was worth it.  Coward.”

   He lowers the knife and raises his voice a little.  For the first time since he sat down, he looks at the body again.  “You heard me.  Coward.  The great Thor.  You think the names they call me are bad?  I may fuck anything that lets me, as you took every opportunity to remind me, but there’s far more shame in what you just did.  Congratulations.  You can finally give up your damn higher ground.

    “You’re a coward.  And, yeah, while we’re add it let’s add traitor.  And… and selfish.  You just, you think you can just leave me?  You’re going to leave me alone with Wednesday‘s newest plan, and with Sigyn, more than halfway mad these days, wandering around somewhere out there, wanting to tie me up again?  You’re leaving me to deal with… fuck.”  His voice breaks and he rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, willing them into a shape without tear ducts.

    “And… and how’s Ragnarok supposed to happen now?  Seriously.  Fucking deserter.”  Unwilling, he pictures the tired Thor of the last few years facing off against the bedraggled mutt he calls “son,”  and has to laugh.  “I guess I’ll have to pick up that slack too.  As if I haven’t always cleaned up your messes. Don’t deny it.”  He levels the knife at the corpse threateningly, waiting, but it doesn’t speak.  “Yep.  Thought not.”

   After a moment, he gives the knife a considering look, then brings it up to scrape against his scalp.  Even more hair falls away, reddish in the motel room’s dim light.  “Balls on a shriveled donkey’s ass!”  he swears reflexively.  It burns.  He’ll be bleeding by the end of this.  

    “And yeah, I got you into a fair number of messes too.  What of it?  Kept you busy, didn’t it?  Kept you interested.  Gave you something to kill with that damn hammer.”  He glares at it, sitting dumbly by the side of the bed, looking like nothing but a tool.  “Gave you the hammer, come to that.  And it was fun.  I don’t recall you complaining too loud.  Most of the time.”

   He laughs, remembering.  “And damn, you look good in a dress.”  The smile fades.  “Looked.  Doubt you’d look good in anything right now.  Something about the giant hole in your head is just… less than attractive.   So add that to the list of reasons this was a damn stupid idea on your part.  Not that you ever had any brains.   Bitch.”

    Thor would have taken that as the worst possible offense.  He would have stood, angry past reckoning, with death in his eyes.  He would have hefted Mjollnir and cried out in a battle rage and attacked.

    The body lies still.

    His eyes can not form tears without tearducts, so Loki’s sob is a dry, ragged thing, that shakes him in his seat.  He can not stop it, or the next.  He puts down the knife, and shakes, and sobs, and curses.  He calls Thor every name imaginable, every name that he’s ever heard flung in the heat of anger.  He taunts,  and screams, and eventually begs.  He uses every piece of magic he has ever known, all of the tricks that would bring a mortal’s body into some semblance of life, or destroy it, or transform it.  Nothing happens.  The body lies there, immutable, and staring.  In the end, he considers stabbing it.

    Instead, he sinks back into his seat, red-eyed and clean shaven and bloody.  “You…” he draws a ragged breath.  “You win.  Ah gods, you win.”

    It takes a long time to wrestle the body into a better position, lying straight on the bed, and it leaves Loki the worse for wear.  The suit will never recover.  Breathless from the exertion, he surveys the damage and thinks over his newest plan.  “You had best appreciate this.  When I see you next.  And I will, don’t you doubt it.”  He hefts Mjolnir, which takes both hands, and puts it on the body’s chest.  “It’ll take me a while, though.  I’ve got to… well, I’ve got to talk to Wednesday first.  It’s going to be a big game.  And now that Ragnarok’s been called off due to lack of participation...”  

    He pulls a coin from his pocket, uneven and dull, and puts it in his mouth.  It gleams on his tongue, and he bends, kisses his best friend and best companion, leaves him the minimum fare required for the journey.  Everything tastes like iron.  He pulls back, takes a last good look.  “Well, now we’ll have to find another way to end everything, won’t we?”

    He steps back.  There are thirteen people in this building, at least thirty on the pier that it sits on.  An acceptable loss.

    “Until then.  Say hello to Hel for me.”

    The room catches on fire in a moment.  The building doesn’t last much longer.  He’s burned, and his suit is nearly incinerated, but he gets off of the pier before it collapses, sending everything on it into the Delaware River.

    Shivering and covered in ash, Mr. World surveys the wreckage with a critical eye.  Not exactly the finest bier, but it will have to do. He has a war to plan.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  
    Mr. World has planned this for something like sixty years.  He's plotted and conned, playing almost everyone he's met, even Wednesday (who is always listening, even when he's dead), to lead to this moment.

    He kind of thought dying would be a little easier.

    Well, when he says he's planned it, it's not completely true.  The big plan, the best one, was for everything to go right.  If he had thrown the spear, if Shadow hadn't been so damned similar to his half-brother, then he'd have ended up with power enough to change the world.  More than enough to bring back one damn dead man, no matter how stubborn he is. 

    Giving that up is hard.  When the dead bitch stabs him, when it's finally clear that they've caught on to the con, well... maybe he loses it a bit.  Mostly it's the pain that he remembers, but he knows he babbles, begs for forgiveness and revenge as the blood fills his lung.  Once, he could have healed this wound in a moment, spun away and shifted his form to one without a huge hole in it.  Now he's pinned and it's far more painful than he had imagined.  And there's nothing he can do to hurt her.  She smiles as he stabs her.  Bitch.

    But when they fall and the spear shifts, he sees a moment of hope.  If he pulls... 

    The spear is covered in his blood when he throws it.  It takes far too much concentration to stumble over to a corner, to cover himself and wait for Shadow.  The boy has always been so much like Baldr, but now, furious and righteous and about to spoil everything, well...

    " _You_ feed on chaos," he says with disgust and realization in his tone, and Loki can't help but smile.  Of course this is how it will end.  The boy has more than one half-brother, after all.  Thor always did ruin his fun.

     His tongue flicks against the bump in his mouth, the coin he had surgically implanted a year ago.  At least he’ll have passage.

   Then it shifts.  Somewhere, his body goes still.  Here, he is standing in front of the gates of a long wooden hall.  He waits for the surge of power that the battle should bring him.

    Nothing happens.  He isn't really surprised.

    The doors swing open, and he smells food and blood.  He recognizes Valhalla, Odin's hall for those who die in battle.  It smells like home, sure, but it's probably not the best place to be right now.  Wednesday won't be happy. 

    Loki grins, shoves his hands into his pockets, and turns away, snubbing his eternal reward.   “Not for me, thanks,” he proclaims to the world at large.  “I’m off to visit my daughter.  I think she’s been taking care of a friend of mine for far too long.”

    He has a lot of explaining to do.  He'll enjoy every moment of it.

   And then he'll get them both out of here.


End file.
